1c (Argentum’s Song – PG)

“Sooner than that I think. It won’t take nearly fifteen days to reach Pheonton now, we’re already nearly through the pass.”

Simon pointedly did not make eye contact with Franklin and gestured to the weirwolves.

“What’s your assessment?”

Argent looked the two corpses over. They were fairly nondescript with the same long, scraggly weir-hide, skewed misshaped skeletons and jagged, murderous teeth that all weirs possessed. The faces were gaunt and haggard, and they seemed divorced enough from humanity to have been suffering from the illness for quite a while. He hazarded a guess.

“Mid-stage scouts or scavengers? Thought a small caravan was prey they could handle on their own?”

Simon shook his head.

“No. Look at the ribs showing through the skin. Haven’t eaten anything for weeks. Probably since infection. That’s why they look further along than they are. Nothing but early stage runts, shunned by their pack and desperate.”

Franklin swaggered over to the far corpse and lifted a limb for a better look.

“I agree, you can tell by -”

“Fool! Step away and don’t touch anything. Do you think this is game? Do you want to be infected?”

The shocked young man dropped the limb and wiped his hand repeatedly on his tunic as Simon’s long pace quickly ate up the distance between them.

“But they’re dead. They can’t bite anymore.”

“Last night you still mocked the existence of weirs, but now you know more of infection than I?”